Watson, Mark

ORAL HISTORY OF MARK WATSON
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
December 19, 2016
MR. MCDANIEL: This is Keith McDaniel. Today is December the 19th, 2016. I am at my studio here in Oak Ridge with Mark Watson. Mark, thank you for coming in to talk with me. MR. WATSON: Great to be with you today, Keith. MR. MCDANIEL: Mark is our current City Manager for the City of Oak Ridge. You've had that job for a number of years. We'll get to that. MR. WATSON: Okay. MR. MCDANIEL: Let's start at the beginning, at your beginning. Tell me where you were born and raised, something about your family. MR. WATSON: I think I was raised all over the place but I was born actually in Boone County, Missouri, in the City of Columbia. My family are natives of that particular region since 1808, about a year after the Lewis and Clark expedition. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? MR. WATSON: Our land is still in the family going back to that time. I've actually seen the deed and it was signed by President Martin Van Buren. MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. MR. WATSON: We're one of the oldest families with a continuous farm in the state of Missouri. MR. MCDANIEL: You grew up on a farm, farm boy. Do you have brothers and sisters? MR. WATSON: I didn't grew up on that farm. MR. MCDANIEL: You didn't? MR. WATSON: No. MR. MCDANIEL: You were born there. MR. WATSON: My family's roots are all there. My father was one of the first members of our family that broke the cycle of education and got out. He got a degree from University of Missouri and also is a City Manager and went to the University of Kansas in the City Management Program after a short stint in the Air Force. That's when I was born. I actually have had a City Manager's child's life and lived in numerous cities over my childhood. I have lived in six different cities in Texas, Oklahoma, Iowa and Kansas during my childhood. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Where did you live the longest? MR. WATSON: I think the longest place that we lived was probably Muskogee, Oklahoma, about six years. MR. MCDANIEL: Really? MR. WATSON: Then I lived a few years in Lawrence, Kansas, which is where my mother lives today. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MR. WATSON: I go back to Lawrence quite often and have a number of family members around there. Our branch of the family left the hometown and ended up tracking down on our own. MR. MCDANIEL: Where did you graduate high school? MR. WATSON: I'm a graduate of Lawrence High School in Lawrence, Kansas. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MR. WATSON: Class 1972 with a class of about 450 graduates in my class. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right. Now, am I mistaken? There's not a DOE [Department of Energy] site in Lawrence is there or close to it? MR. WATSON: No. MR. MCDANIEL: No. MR. WATSON: There's a major university there, university town with University of Kansas but not a Department of Energy. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right. For some reason, I thought that. As I see it, did you have brothers and sisters growing up? MR. WATSON: I have three other siblings, three brothers. They all live in the Kansas City area. MR. MCDANIEL: Are they older? Younger? MR. WATSON: They're all younger than I am. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MR. WATSON: I was the eldest. There's about a 10-year spread between all four of us. MR. MCDANIEL: In high school, obviously, education was important to your family. I'm sure it was expected for you to go to college and you probably intended to do that. Did you know what you wanted to do with your life? MR. WATSON: I think we all start out and try to find our niche and what we like to do. Actually, my undergraduate career started out in English Literature. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MR. WATSON: I got actively engaged in some innovative, creative teaching classes and an integrated humanities program, which had a resounding effect on me and how I work with people and how I appreciate what we do as a country, as citizens. I've always enjoyed learning from that aspect. I think as I got into my senior year in college, I started to plan. "Okay. What's the next step?" I was probably on the law school path then I got detoured in my final semester. My senior year, I took six months overseas to study in Ireland, the Republic at that time, and went there for studying and continuing in Irish literature and other types of things. I was going to take the LSAT [Law School Admissions Test] exam one more time and decided not to. I thought that my forte was working with people and actually talking to them. Not dealing necessarily with the law. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: I applied for the Masters in Public Administration Program. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MR. WATSON: First in Kansas and went there and continued my studies when I returned from overseas. MR. MCDANIEL: You said your father was a city manager. MR. WATSON: Yeah. MR. MCDANIEL: You traveled a lot. You moved a lot. Did that make you think twice about Public Administration? MR. WATSON: I think that ever since I was a small child, I was taking care of city business from the standpoint of phone calls and helping people. The unique aspect of local government is that it is the one that's closest to the people, the one that affects people. You can actually have a very strong impact on people. I thought that that was more my forte as opposed to researching the law books and took that approach. I also observed my father in solving problems from Washington D.C., on back to the local level. How you had to manipulate and walk yourself through all the various political aspects of the job and the technical aspects. City manager, when you look at a job description of one, that the city manager is in charge of everything that the city does or does not do. You have to know every aspect of your work and how you can do it better. It's not only just efficiency and effectiveness but equity and fairness and all of those issues come into play. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: I think another influence was is that in 1970s when we moved to Lawrence, Kansas, and my father became City Manager at that point in time, he stayed there for a long time. He was there for 20 years and died of a sudden heart attack after a City Council meeting. You recognize the public-ness of how all this comes about. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. MR. WATSON: I think one of the things that we saw, that I observed from my father was his ability to work with the most disparate elements of a community and bring them together, to come to conclusions and accomplishments as a community, and rebuilding a community and changing the way it will work for the future. If you don't ever make those decisions in a community, the world will pass you by. Some of the communities that I've looked at, I always go back to their histories and try to decide: what are those defining moments in the history of the community? I think if you look at let's say Lawrence, Kansas, for a minute, you might find that in 1863 when William Quantrill took a number of confederate renegades over from Missouri and killed 165 men. That was a defining moment in the history of that community. You can look at all of the communities that I've served over time and you'll find those moments. For instance, there was a critical decision in the first town that I was City Manager in Stamford, Texas, a small town out in West Texas. If you look up in the Almanac in 1925, city of Stamford had more miles of brick streets than the city of Fort Worth. MR. MCDANIEL: Really? MR. WATSON: Because they were progressive, they moved ahead. Adopted the council manager form of government in 1918 when it had only been formed in 1912. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MR. WATSON: They were a leading community out there but they got to a point where they needed to make a decision. A new college wanted to come to town. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. MR. WATSON: They decided that they really didn't need another college in town. They already had two. That was enough. Today, the city of Stamford is a dying community, fading away but that college turned into Texas Tech. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? MR. WATSON: Lubbock is now 275,000 people. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. MR. WATSON: These decisions we make are critical and sometimes we don't know how good they are, when they come to us face to face. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. Yeah. That is true. I guess you're able to learn a lot from your father just by watching him and watching him relate to people. Probably that was as much an education for you as your professional training was, I would say. MR. WATSON: I think one of the things that you look at from a professional training standpoint is there's lot of book learning that you can get but at the same time, there is also the practicum street and how some of these things come about. The sympathy that you have for somebody who has had all their belongings destroyed and lost in a tornado. What do you do with flooding year after year? What do you do about discrimination in your community? When I grew up, one thing that was a powerful influence in 1970 was the heart of the Vietnam era, and I was fortunate that I wasn't drafted. I was Number 325, I think, in the draft, so I didn't have to go anywhere, but at the same time, it was a horrible situation to grow up in. Our community blew up with racial politics in the Vietnam War era. Even in my high school, our high school had fallen backwards when we had full race riots. Inside of a week, there were five people killed within the community. I went to school with National Guard, had 200 National Guards in there to ensure your safety while you were in school. We had training the years after I was in school for race relations. We also had big Native American population where there was also the discrimination aspects that came into play. MR. MCDANIEL: This was in Lawrence, right? MR. WATSON: This was in Lawrence, Kansas. When you observe all of that and people are getting shot at and the rule of law fades away, you can see how closely and delicate we are as a community and as a country. It can affect everybody very rapidly. I remind people that as we go through some of these cycles that we're basically repeating our history. You have to call upon folks like myself to recall some of these and say, "You know, we've seen discrimination before. It wasn't just in Selma, Alabama. It was in other places." You have to make critical decisions like Oak Ridge did when they desegregated their schools and took that ploy. Now the original mayor of Oak Ridge lost his job because of that decision. Somebody has to make that decision and they're critical for your community to move on. MR. MCDANIEL: I would imagine just based on your comments there that being a student of history is a very valuable thing for a public servant. MR. WATSON: Well, it is. I think if you go back into the history books of a community, you can find out what has transpired and what directions the community is taking. Are they an independent community? They can be proud of their heritage but does that heritage drag them down as an anchor? MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: We remember the good old days. If you drove through the city of Stamford in Texas in 1957, '58 and '59, they were the state champions in football. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: Those were the good old days but those 1950s drag them down. They would lose their momentum as a community. You have to remember that you can move ahead and you have to make a change in your form of government and your activities that you're involved with and to make sure that it's good for your community as a whole. I've had the opportunity through my career to work in four states now. I worked in Texas. MR. MCDANIEL: Stamford, right? MR. WATSON: Stamford was- MR. MCDANIEL: Stamford was your first. MR. WATSON: Yeah. I actually didn't start right out in the city management seat. I spent four years learning the trade and working with some great city managers. I worked with a man by the name of Leland Nelson in University Park, Texas. I got straight out of school. He said, "I want you to go run a department for me." MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MR. WATSON: I tried that and then I got my first job and went to Wichita Falls, Texas and I was able to work under a guy by the name of Jerry Fox, who later was the County Manager of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, for many, many years and shaped what Charlotte is today as a community. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? MR. WATSON: I worked under him. He's a great mentor and actually, he was a classmate of my father's in college. We spent some time there. One of the things I experienced in 1979 under his watch was the third largest tornado on record at the time in the United States in 1979. That particular tornado came through, killed 45 people. MR. MCDANIEL: Where was that? MR. WATSON: Wichita Falls, Texas. MR. MCDANIEL: Wichita Falls, okay. MR. WATSON: Killed 45 people, was 11 miles on the ground in the city. I think at the time it destroyed basically $100 million worth of property. MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. MR. WATSON: Immediately displaced 30,000 people. As you experienced that, just this last week, watching what's happening in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and the wildfires up there. They're in for a long haul because I saw that. I've experienced that. You just don't rebuild tomorrow. It'll take years. It'll take years for them to get back to where they were, but there's a chance and an opportunity in that tragedy, to be able to build back better and safer and correctly. That's the important thing that we really have to remember when some of these tragedies hit us, they actually can be opportunities. I think that has had a profound experience on me in how I approach things. I'm not afraid to rebuild in a different way or approach something that needs a change. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: You have to be able to try to address it and just because the road’s there, maybe that's not the right place for the road. Maybe that's a better place for a new apartment complex or something. MR. MCDANIEL: The status quo I guess is not going to last very long. You're either going forward or you're going backward. It's not going to stay where you are. MR. WATSON: That's right. You got to remember. Everything's always in a constant state of change. That's the only certain thing is change out there. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. MR. WATSON: New generations are going to move on. There's history, of course, that has to be maintained but then the history also needs to match up with what the future is of the community. I think that's very essential when you talk about managing a community these days. MR. MCDANIEL: Your first city manager job was with Stamford, Texas. MR. WATSON: Yes. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. Where did you go from there? MR. WATSON: I spent four years in Stamford, which was a cotton, oil and cattle community out in West Texas. Then I went on an adventure and I took the City Manager's job of Mission, Texas, which was in far South Texas in the Rio Grande. I was closer to major cities in Mexico than I was to cities in the United States. MR. MCDANIEL: Did you feel like you were out in the middle of nowhere? MR. WATSON: No. I felt like I was a minority definitely along the Rio Grande. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: It was a bilingual community. We had a lot of winter folks that came down and visited. Basically, it was a city of about 30,000. It would double in the winter time. It was based on tourism and also agriculture, the great fruit industry was central and core to that area. Five miles to the south, I was in another nation. You would spend a lot of time working in an international environment. That was very helpful to me. My council meetings would switch from English to Spanish and back to the English again. There was a constant change but we worked very, very well together and accomplished a number of major changes while I was there. MR. MCDANIEL: Were you fluent in Spanish? MR. WATSON: I was not. I was fluent in French. I'll throw out a French word here and there. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. MR. WATSON: If I didn't know the word, I might throw out the word “biblioteca” from the library and the Spanish equivalent of “biblioteca” would come up and they would know what I was talking about. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure. Sure. MR. WATSON: I actually taught myself Spanish with some of the folks there. We were able to converse quite well. I still can switch languages pretty easily today. MR. MCDANIEL: How long were you in Mission? MR. WATSON: I spent another four years in Mission. It was a great environment. We were building a new railroad bridge across the river into Mexico. A lot of industrial development activity that was occurring in that area. Worked with the agricultural industry and learned how the grapefruit industry worked and as a city, we had to treat a lot of their affluent and acetic affluent as they're making orange juice and grapefruit juice and those kinds of things. You gain experience as you go through those types of environments. I think the other thing that I would find down there is working with multi-cultural community: we could spend a lot of time in learning what some of the cultural norms were. We found that people, no matter how small the house or how incidental it was, it was theirs. The ownership was essential in that Spanish culture. As we would work with individuals, education was important to them and opportunity. We worked very closely with our industries and businesses to make sure those opportunities were there and presented themselves. After that, I was recruited to come up to the Dallas Fort Worth Metropolitan area. MR. MCDANIEL: Let me ask you a question before you get away from Mission. As they say undocumented workers, was that an issue? Was it the norm? MR. WATSON: It was never an issue really. I think when you look at undocumented issues, we had an open border back at that point in time. Mexican nationals could get a shopping cart to come over and shop and go back and forth across river. Most of the time, you'll find that with Mexican nationals there's not a desire to necessarily be in the United States. It's all part of the economics of that particular region. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: Then when you'd see programs such as NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement] that had been adopted in the Clinton administration, the idea was to make ourselves competitive on a worldwide basis. When you had folks in China that were working at 75 cents an hour, how does as a wiper blade company in Buffalo compete when their janitor is making $25 an hour? MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. MR. WATSON: A good example was, wiper blade company did move to South Texas and created some $10-an-hour jobs for some Americans and then they would do some assembly of wiper blades on the Mexican side at a dollar-and-a-quarter-an-hour and made those wiper blades competitive again. Okay. On a small scale, you have to look at how that international environment could work. They called them maquiladoras. The maquiladoras come from the verb maquillar, which is “to assemble.” If you were assembling seat belts for Ford, do you do that at $25 an hour in Dearborn, Michigan? Do you do that with a neighboring country creating a stable job for them and allowing them to increase and improve their capacity on life? I think it's a very workable situation as you look at it from a job standpoint. MR. MCDANIEL: I just wondered because I would imagine being that close to the border that it was like there almost wasn't a border. You had lots of come and go between folks in that area. MR. WATSON: Yeah. I think the thing was and we'll get into that because I've lived on the border in two different locations. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right. MR. WATSON: I think that when you look at how that situation works, you're creating jobs that are of value. They help the North American economy and also help us in a worldwide economy. The undocumented alien is the one that is heading up to work with a roofing company in Atlanta or so. We created that. We created that situation but one of the things that we concentrate on is our State Department has a lot of responsibility for that. The State Department, instead of working on treaties and requirements with the nation of Mexico, we spend a lot of time over in the Middle East and Jordan and Syria, wherever. When in fact, we probably should get our house in order with our neighbors to the south because one thing that the Mexican Constitution has that's different than the United States Constitution is that every three years, every elected official in the nation of Mexico has to leave their position. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? MR. WATSON: They can run for another position but they can't run for the same. Imagine that if everybody is term limited out. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, absolutely. MR. WATSON: The entire nation goes so there is no history of government. As a consequence, you have that change out, which makes it very difficult for the nation to do that. In the meantime, if you're trying to get something accomplished at the national level, you've only got two terms, which is six years to get it done with the president before a new president comes into play. That's it. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Exactly. Exactly. All right. You went to Dallas, Fort Worth. MR. WATSON: Went up to Dallas, Fort Worth and I was asked to be with the City of Grapevine, Texas. Grapevine is known as the location for the Dallas, Fort Worth Airport. All of the terminals are located in the city limits of Grapevine. MR. MCDANIEL: That's north, almost center. MR. WATSON: It's in the center between Dallas and Fort Worth, right in the middle. MR. MCDANIEL: Yes, sure. MR. WATSON: Anyway, a small town of about 30,000 and then with millions of visitors. 700,000 takeoffs and landings every year located at that particular airport. I gained experience working with an airport facility. We were involved with the Dallas Fort Worth Airport expansion project, which was just an incredible, multi-billion dollar, multi-decade improvement project. I can go back today and see some of those improvements that were planned out in 1990. MR. MCDANIEL: When were you there? MR. WATSON: I was there from '89 to '92. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MR. WATSON: Okay. At that time, the town was also growing immensely. A lot of the residents were pilots that would live in Grapevine, worked for Delta, worked for American Airlines. Spent a lot of time with those types of business entities, had a small- MR. MCDANIEL: Let me ask you a question. I'm sorry. I don't mean to interrupt. MR. WATSON: Yeah. MR. MCDANIEL: You went there in '89. Was there anything that you had to deal with concerned with the airport because I think it was just in '86, three years earlier was when they had that devastating Delta crash? MR. WATSON: Yeah, the L-1011 crash? MR. MCDANIEL: Yes. Yes. MR. WATSON: That pre-dated me by a couple of years but it affected a lot of our planning because as we talked about the clear zones in and around an airport, there were particular areas that we were concerned about. When we looked at the expansion of the airport with the new outward runways coming into play, because the anticipated growth for Dallas Fort Worth was tremendous and they wanted to expand that airport. We said, "Look at these clear zones. Look at the L-1011 crash. How do we protect ourselves?" MR. MCDANIEL: There's a team down on the interstate or something or road- MR. WATSON: Yeah. You can have the road crossing an airport runway. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. MR. WATSON: You're not going to protect yourself from that. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure. MR. WATSON: When it comes to housing and expansion, which then in fact, housing, we had an elementary school that would have been dead center in the middle of a proposed runway. How are we going to address that? Are we going to move concentrated area, people out of that area, which we eventually did. MR. MCDANIEL: The reason I brought that up is I was living in Dallas when that happened. I remember sitting and watching the news, the last five minutes of the nightly newscast. That came on and it stayed on until midnight, I guess. They broadcast. I remember that very vividly. MR. WATSON: When you see those kinds of incidents happen, it heightens your awareness of what you need to do next. As I've dealt with community there, there was a lot of re-development that needed to occur. They were just a small city at the time. Today, that city has grown in its office and service and tourism environment. It's a great community. They've done some good things. MR. MCDANIEL: Now, after Grapevine, where did you go? MR. WATSON: After Grapevine, I was recruited to go to Billings, Montana. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MR. WATSON: Billings, Montana, is the largest city in Montana. A lot of people don't really realize how big Montana is but if I were to put the northwest corner in Chicago, the southeast corner would be in Washington D.C. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Wow. MR. WATSON: You put that in scale. MR. MCDANIEL: That's huge. MR. WATSON: It's huge. We were the largest city in Montana. You could go up on the cliffs above the town and look down. You could probably see about 15% of the entire state's population in one place. MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. Yeah. MR. WATSON: It was a large city. It had a ward system. I was the City Administrator of the city. Everybody basically reported to me, very strong governmental system. They had 11 city council members. Ten of them with two per ward for five different wards. We work very hard on downtown re-development. Downtown was sluggish at that time, as many people see. I was there from '93 until '99. I was able to deal with a lot of the re-planning of the downtown area, the re-development of the railroad depot area and old historic structures that were in that area. Also, we're dealing with a lot of environmental issues with sewage lines into new areas. We had a great water plant and sewage system. One of the best utility operators that I've ever worked with and this guy was just absolutely incredible. He said, "You're going to take a little bit of pain and heat but we're not going to have broken water lines and we're going to have a system that works." MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: He was able to recover about 93% of the water that was pumped out. The system was in place. MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. MR. WATSON: If I compare that today to Oak Ridge, we only recover about 70% of what's pumped out. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. MR. WATSON: This guy just had an incredible knack for knowing which thing to fix at the right time and the right investment and working very well. Of course, we were dealing with Yellowstone River. We had to be very cognizant of environmental degradation that might be associated with that. This was a large community so it really had to have large industrial-scale type facilities. MR. MCDANIEL: Was that a time of growth for Billings? Was it really a time of things were wearing out so you're going to have to rebuild and- MR. WATSON: I think it was a calm before the growth really would hit Montana. There weren't a lot of jobs at Montana. You can't move there and expect to just find something. You had a lot of returning folks from Montana that would go back. For instance, I think in the whole state, there were about 250 engineers. You had to wait for one of those engineers whether they were mechanical or civil, to leave or die. MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly. MR. WATSON: Then you could come in and fill one of those voids. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. Yeah. MR. WATSON: There just wasn't that much work. The work ethic was different there. Unlike Texas for instance, you work because you have to work. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. MR. WATSON: In Montana, you work as a necessary evil so that you can enjoy the riches of Montana. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MR. WATSON: You work to get off work. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: In Montana, people didn't talk about their jobs at a Christmas party. They talked about what they did last week and the big trout they caught or the elk that they were able to hunt and those kinds of things. So, a different attitude. I think that gave me another appreciation for the differences that you might find from place to place. We had a wonderful time. It was a great place to raise kids. I know that our Deputy Fire Chief is now the Fire Chief in Bozeman, Montana. He's left Tennessee to go there and I think that will be a great experience for him. MR. MCDANIEL: Where did you go after Billings? MR. WATSON: After Billings, I had the Texans call me back. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MR. WATSON: I was asked to come down to a community in central Texas, name of Temple, Texas. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: Temple is about 60,000 people at the time. It was a medical-based community. There were three very large hospitals, Scott & White [Memorial Hospital], King’s Daughters National Veterans Hospital, fourth largest veteran’s hospital in the system. Then there was also Texas A&M Hospital. All of that with 1200 doctors, I think, in the city. MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. MR. WATSON: It'd be much like Rochester, Minnesota, and the Mayo Clinic. Our city in Temple was really in the league-leading aspects of medicine and medical research. We established, one of the things that we accomplished while I was there, was the first biomedical research district in the state of Texas and in the nation. We were able to address those issues in establishing places where research would come and have the financial incentives, much like you would have with an industrial park. This was all bio-med. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Right. MR. WATSON: Being creative like that, you have an ability to enhance the economic capacity of your community as a whole. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: By looking at something differently. I think we got involved with national security. President Bush was in office at the time. That hospital, Scott & White Hospital was the hospital that we had to take care of if the President were to need hospital care. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? MR. WATSON: While he was down south. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: His ranch was a few miles from us. He would come in and have checkups or he would have tests and all kinds of things were all done there. If he were laid up to, then we had security measures that we had to accommodate like how can he escape from a fourth story room and get out of the hospital, if something bad were to occur? MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. Yeah. MR. WATSON: We would use our ladder truck to serve as a rescue device to pull the President should that type of thing happen. MR. MCDANIEL: I imagine Secret Service in your city worked together very closely on some of those things. MR. WATSON: We did. We spent a lot of time dealing with that. One of the fun things we did in Temple while I was there was build the first child designed playground that I've been involved with, which was the playground that we built down along the railroad tracks, Whistle Stop Park. This was designed by kids and developed much like our Cedar Hill Park here in Oak Ridge. We worked with the company that did that. My wife and I really enjoyed spending that time working on those kinds of events. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: The project went really well and was part of an entire renovation of an area along the railroad tracks that's created a wonderful park. There's a railroad museum and a restoration, did a $5 million restoration of the 1901 of Arlington Northern Depot. All in green marble and wood, just an exquisite example of the good old days when trains were king. We really worked hard on renovating a sleepy old town that had seen some of its luster wear off. Today I think it's fairly strong with a lot of public investment in public facilities back into the community. MR. MCDANIEL: After Temple. MR. WATSON: After Temple, went on to another new adventure out in Yuma, Arizona. A city of about 100,000 population out on the Mexico, Arizona, California border. MR. MCDANIEL: Yes. They are the border town. MR. WATSON: Yeah. It was a river boat town originally. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. MR. WATSON: It was a crossing of the Colorado River back when they were no crossings because of a canyon, Grand Canyon upstream. All of that soil that came out of that Grand Canyon is now in Yuma, Arizona. Again, with agricultural markets, we spent a lot of time working with the farming industry there, the corporate farming industry and saw some really fascinating management techniques as to providing the foods that the United States eats during all the winter months. MR. MCDANIEL: We're talking big farming. MR. WATSON: We're talking big farming. MR. MCDANIEL: Huge farming, yeah. MR. WATSON: About 700,000 acres on the Arizona-side, combine that with Imperial Valley another 700,000 acres and another 600,000 acres in Mexico. All of that area is feeding Canada and the United States during the winter months. MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly. Exactly. MR. WATSON: When you're dealing with that, you have to have good transportation systems. You have to make sure that they can get the product to market. You can imagine every shipper coming in and picking up everything from lemons to wheat to corn to whatever. All that is done. MR. MCDANIEL: I would imagine there is a huge train system through there. Wouldn't it? MR. WATSON: Not enough time. They're not fast enough. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? MR. WATSON: Not fast enough because Walmart may say, "I need to have 12,000 tons of lettuce." They come in to get that 12,000 tons of lettuce on a certain day. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MR. WATSON: They're expecting that so they have to have a field that is ready on December 12th to go to market. They're picking that up and it's going to Des Moines, to Seattle, to Tampa. It will travel all night and it will be there in the next morning. That's their delivery system. It has to work. Transportation becomes really critical for community as a whole.
In Yuma again, on the border, you're dealing with large agencies. There are 50 different federal agencies in the border area there. Particularly in the customs and immigration and border patrol, all of those angles. When I arrived there, it was a very critical and that we were having a lot of intrusion into the United States with illegal entry. They would actually come to Yuma first and try to go on to Vegas or San Diego or Phoenix but they would have to get across the border. We would have some very horrendous situations where there were crashes and they'd pile 16 people into a Suburban and make a dash for it. There was a chase in town and you'd have intersections and accidents. It's really, really a mess. One of the things that President Bush did was put together the fencing program that really worked very, very well. At the time, we had, in 2005, there were 165,000 arrests and apprehensions going through that 70-mile wide sector of the United States border. After the fencing was put into play, that dropped to 300 or less. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? MR. WATSON: Yeah. MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. MR. WATSON: Huge investment but saved a lot of time as far as the United States was concerned. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure. Sure. MR. WATSON: There were great opportunities for the winter visitors that were there because they could go across to Mexico and have those that were uninsured in the health insurance and all. Many would go over and get treatments. They would get medicines. They could do that at a nominal cost as opposed to an American cost. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: Many of the doctors in this one little town near by (it's called Algodones) was a medical town. You could go in there and get your crowns replaced. You could get new eye prescriptions or new hearing aids or any of that kind of stuff. There was a whole health market. MR. MCDANIEL: At a fraction cost. MR. WATSON: At 25%. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. Sure. MR. WATSON: You could get your teeth cleaned for 20 bucks. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? MR. WATSON: Yeah. MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. MR. WATSON: When you have that kind of engagement, you could begin to see what national policies were like. A lot of people would come through there from a traveling standpoint or trying to get to points beyond, but I think what we saw is that the border can be repaired. The poor person that's on one side of the border in Mexico, not only has to have the permissions of the United States government to get in here but they have to have the permissions of the Mexican government to leave. The Mexican government has somebody that's earning $100 a month have to travel to the capital of the province. They would go to Sonora on a 10-mile or 10-hour bus trip. They'd have to do that four times to get their permit so that they could go. Each time, that would cost them $100. Four months of their annual wage was used to get a necessary permit. The incentive was to ignore it. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, ignore it. Try to get across. MR. WATSON: Get across. We're all guilty in this a little bit in the regulations and stuff that go with it. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, so after Yuma. MR. WATSON: After Yuma, we had a political change in the political climate particularly border communities are fairly turbulent sometimes. I felt like we reached that stage where it was going south. I'd done all that I could do. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. MR. WATSON: Took time out. I said, "I'll just sit back and let's see where the tea leaves fall." MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: The lobbyist for Yuma, Arizona, was actually the lobbyist for Oak Ridge, Tennessee. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? MR. WATSON: That's how we got connected. I ended up coming to Oak Ridge. I have never lived east of the Mississippi before. We decided to take a look at it and anyway, went through a long selection process, an orderly process done by the Oak Ridge City Council and all. I was selected out of a group of four or five, I believe. It felt right and it felt like we could match up pretty well. I had something to offer to the community and took the job in August of 2010. MR. MCDANIEL: 2010, so over six years now. MR. WATSON: Yes. MR. MCDANIEL: Yes, over six years now. Talk about your biggest challenges. Maybe some of your biggest surprises just in Oak Ridge maybe compared to some of the other places that you've served. MR. WATSON: I think one of the interesting things, we talk a lot about the Department of Energy. Yeah. We have a close symbiotic relationship with the Department of Energy and all of the facets that they do. I guess one thing that surprised me was the separateness of the community with the department. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MR. WATSON: Some of that separation I think has evolved over the years. You built the Pellissippi Parkway that opened up broad expanses of land and commuting possibilities. You've had the change that has occurred. I think it's been really a challenge for the community to wrap their arms around it to say, "How come somebody doesn't want to live here? How come somebody is leaving here and going elsewhere?" I think one of the things that you have to do is we are no different than Stamford, Texas, or Yuma, Arizona, as we have to create an environment in which it is attractive to people and that they want to live here. They can feel safe. They can bring their kids up in a good school system and we begin to see that all happening now. We've had some significant change over in six years. You got a new City Manager. You got a new school superintendent. You got new leaders and contractors associated with Department of Energy. I think you've seen transition and change over in the city councils and stability with the Board of Education. I think all of that's helped us align with some particular directions. I think as you look at the Department of Energy, one surprising thing (and I worked with several military bases in my career) there was a Marine Corps airbase in Yuma. There was an Army base in Yuma. There was Fort Hood in Temple, Texas. I was working with the border patrols in those different areas. I felt the relationship is totally different with them than and the desire to work with the community as you see with the Department of Energy. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure. MR. WATSON: Okay. If you go through a BRAC [Base Realignment and Closure] process with the Department of Defense, one of the aspects of that is how well does the community support your activities? They don't have to go through BRAC with Department of Energy. Sometimes, that relationship is not there. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MR. WATSON: It's just little things that you might see such as the Vice President is coming to town and taking a tour of the Oak Ridge National Lab. He's in your city limits. The Mayor's not invited to attend. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MR. WATSON: There's some distance there. I think I've worked hard to bring that distance closer together, to get us engaged. It's also has to be constantly reinforced, because in a way, you have a military-base aspect to the Department of Defense facilities or the Department of Energy facilities. As you see those activities going on, we really have to work together differently and establish continuity in those relationships. I think we're slowly getting there. MR. MCDANIEL: It was something you mentioned earlier, I think you're right on target with that, it has evolved to where it is today. I know historically in the early days, it was a very close connection between the DOE facilities and the city and the people and the town. MR. WATSON: Right. MR. MCDANIEL: They would encourage their employees to run for city council, to be a part of the community, to do things in the community. It's different now. MR. WATSON: That's different now. A bank president used to work for the city council but the bank may look at whether that gains them any value, to be on the city council. Do they lose accounts because they're making controversial decisions? I think those are some of the challenges that you see today. I encourage a city council member to really look at where they want to go. What little contribution do they want to make in their four short years on the city council? Then do they try to guide in that particular direction? It may be the renovation of a park. It may be the CSX bike trail. It may be developing something on the waterfront, all of those things. Then we get into a sequence where we're making continuous progress toward those goals. I think that's been an essential element for some of the success. MR. MCDANIEL: As city manager and as council, like you said, you want to make process, gradually process and things will take placement. There's lots of different specific areas that you have to look at. MR. WATSON: Yeah. MR. MCDANIEL: I've talked to a lot of people about why do people not live here? There's lots of reasons. One of the significant ones is the housing market. That certainly plays a role in it. It may not be the only thing but it certainly plays so you got that. Then on the flip side of that, you got this incredible, tremendous school system that they want their kids to attend. MR. WATSON: Sure. As you look at community and you see this in a metropolitan area. You have all levels of economics. You've got all levels of ethnicities. You've got all levels of education. When you're in a community like that, you will find that people will cluster together with like people. For instance in Grapevine, Texas, 92% of the people had a four-year college degree. Okay. That doesn't leave much room for the GED [General Education Diploma] crowd. MR. MCDANIEL: Eight percent. Yeah, sure. MR. WATSON: The GEDs might have been very comfortable in Mesquite. You get these different variations as to where you live. In a community that's small and independent such as Oak Ridge, you begin to see all of those demographics all at once, on a smaller scale. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. MR. WATSON: Blending those becomes really important. A house that I got in that was built 70 years ago, that's 1400 square feet and is really big to perhaps a 90-year old. MR. MCDANIEL: That's okay. That's all right. MR. WATSON: Shall we pause? MR. MCDANIEL: We'll let the phone stop ringing. That's okay. Is that yours or mine? MR. WATSON: Mine. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. That's what I was thinking because I turned mine off. We don't have to. MR. WATSON: There it goes. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right. MR. WATSON: I think when you look at improving the community and you have people looking at things that come and expected to have, you can look into Year 2016 and the National Home Builder Association's average size of a house is 2200 square feet. We in our community have taken at least 40% of our housing off the market that's in a national norm. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: Okay. How can we make that better? Not everybody is going to like the tiny home trend. If you're like me and my family, sometimes we get more stuff every year. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, exactly. MR. WATSON: I think we have to balance that out and see how we can create a community that people desire to be in. We want to preserve the property values. That comes through us having rules. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: We have to have rules. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MR. WATSON: You may think it's normal to fix the engine of your pickup truck in the front yard. The neighbor next door doesn't. We have to decide whether we're going to allow that or not. That's something that the city councils really get into and have to try to figure that out. One of the things, you've asked about successes with Oak Ridge, I think we recently have proven that we can be successful with big projects such as Oak Ridge Main Street. We've had to force ourselves to look ahead. There were critical decisions made in the community that stopped the community. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MR. WATSON: Okay. When you petition and you say, "We don't like this project. Please stop it." How about a little foresight as to why you're stopping that and what the cost benefit of stopping it is? I estimate that the Oak Ridge Mall that laid dormant for 20 years probably cost this community $40 million. The bond issue to improve it was a $20 million bond issue. Were we smart? It's hard to tell, and the pundants will be able to debate that. I know today, that we're [the developer] spending $92 million to create the Oak Ridge Main Street project that will be updated in a new and different style than we've had in the past, with people living there, with retail and also the office space that will come in there. MR. MCDANIEL: I could be wrong here but it's similar to the city center plan to a certain degree. MR. WATSON: To a certain degree. MR. MCDANIEL: That the voters voted down the bond issue on. MR. WATSON: Absolutely. MR. MCDANIEL: Now it's costing us $92 million when we could have done it 15 years ago for $20 million. MR. WATSON: Maybe we would have had $20 million more in the pocket. MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly. Yeah. I can say that. You have to be more diplomatic on those things. MR. WATSON: I think I can be honest in the oral history. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, absolutely. MR. WATSON: Sometimes, we can't see the forest for the trees. It ends up being a cost for all of us. We are a small player when it comes to some of the systems that we have. For instance, we only have 15,000 in electrical customers but we're trying to maintain a system that covers 70 square miles. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: Okay. Some of our system is old because it was put in by federal forces and all, but when we look at replacing a substation, we're talking $6 million to do that and then nobody likes debt. We get worried about our bonded indebtedness and all. It really takes a balance for us to look at the decisions that we make as a community. The effect of making a non-decision can equally be as detrimental to the community. MR. MCDANIEL: Speaking of that, I'm not going to have you go into the whole water sewer system EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] issue, because I will just refer people to the oral history with Gary Cinder that I just did just a few days ago. He talked about that fairly extensively. I don't want to repeat that but that's an issue. That was an issue. MR. WATSON: Also an important issue and just like a car or a driveway. There's a certain amount of maintenance that you have to put into that car every year so that it hums. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. MR. WATSON: When the technology changes and so forth, you either got to upgrade that or you got to buy a new car. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Exactly. MR. WATSON: Those were some of the decisions that we see as being involved with our community. I think as we look at investing, it will have the investments that we are making now are going to have investments, future investments that will spin off of those that will continue to make us move ahead as a community. Some of our contracts will not be DOE contracts, but there will be new things such as the composite industry or 3D printing. We have to deal with the world market. As we're dealing with 3D printing and the raw materials that need to come into our community, but we'll get there slowly but surely and methodically. MR. MCDANIEL: Exclusive of the federal relationship, what have been the biggest challenges for being the city manager in Oak Ridge? MR. WATSON: I think one of the basic challenges that we've had is sometimes not knowing how to make a decision. When you tend to want to continuously delay or not get to a vote, we haven't been successful, because there will always be another reason why you can't or shouldn't or should delay. I think as we look at things, we need to be able to move forward. The professional staffs that we have in city government are some of the best around. I think we have to allow them to do their jobs and the council to take some of those recommendations and not rehash them but do the final enhancement and icing on the cake so that we can move forward. MR. MCDANIEL: Let the professionals do what the professionals do. MR. WATSON: Yeah. They are just as vested in the community. Today, I have all but one person of the senior staff lives in the community. That's been an important thing of mine. How can you be engaged if you don't live here? MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly. MR. WATSON: We're getting more and more of our lower staff levels to come into our community. We're looking at ways to make us a part of the community. I think that makes a lot of difference. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: I think as we begin to examine where Oak Ridge is going in the future, we've made good critical steps. We need to be open to development and redevelopment. We are landlocked. It doesn't seem like it but we are landlocked. There is no way that we can expand outwards. We have to be very smart in how we use our land inward. From a private sector standpoint, folks are not going to go and buy 100 lots like Kroger's did. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, sure. Exactly. Exactly. MR. WATSON: Okay. Not everybody is going to have the patience to do something like that. At the same time, we only have two major thoroughfares through our community. That's where your commercial growth is going to be. Visibility, being seen and so forth. Yet if we have somebody that wants to change a piece of property along those corridors, we fight them. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. MR. WATSON: We don’t need to be fighting the folks along those corridors, because today, your house backs up to where a Dollar General Store may be. MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly. Exactly. MR. WATSON: Okay. I think there has to be some acceptance of that, that if you're buying a house that's backing up to this lot, there may be a Dollar General Store on your future property. You need to recognize that. If we can save ourselves time to say that's accepted, then when somebody's ready to go, we can actively get that project up and running and producing sales tax and economics. That's bringing business into our community that's better for all of us. MR. MCDANIEL: I think a good example of some of that is the whole Aubrey's- MR. WATSON: Section? MR. MCDANIEL: All of this section why it goes a long that whole area right there and the whole strip now between all these and Weigel's. It wasn't there just a few years ago. It's very busy. MR. WATSON: That took our [city] incentive to say, "You know what? We could move our road." When we moved our road and then we said, we can put a stoplight here. Your property tax can pay for that stoplight and slow the traffic down out on the main drag. It's been a very successful venture. We expect the same thing with Oak Ridge Main Street. Perhaps some of the other projects that are further down the strip can do that. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: I think we've been successful in seeing those kinds of changes that occurred later. In a couple of weeks, we will be officially transferring land from the Department of Energy to the City of Oak Ridge, which will allow further development along Illinois Avenue. It will be important for that to go smoothly. That changes something like the AMSE [American Museum of Science and Energy] Building, but we're providing for space, new space, high quality space, $1.8 million worth of renovation and remodeling that they're eligible to do as opposed to the old building that has a $12,000 a month electrical utility bill. MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly. Exactly. MR. WATSON: If we can take those kinds of things and be open to what they might be in the future, then I think we got a bright opportunity. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: We have to look at what's essential for us to preserve in the community. We have a historical district that encompasses all of the legacy housing. We know we can't preserve all of that, but yet from a standpoint of that person assembling 10 of those and building three new homes and dealing with that. That may not be the best way to examine that. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure. MR. WATSON: Making our community better consistently and moving forward, I think we're on the right track. We've got a lot of land that's available for new housing. Maybe that housing doesn't need to be on postage stamps. It needs to be on decent sized lots, that can accommodate national norms of home building and we'll begin to see change continuously within our community. MR. MCDANIEL: We moved into this house almost 11 years ago. One of the most attractive things about it was that it's three quarters of an acre and it's flat. I had two young kids. I wanted a yard for my kids to play in. MR. WATSON: You couldn't do that up on Jefferson [Avenue]. MR. MCDANIEL: I couldn't. MR. WATSON: The lots aren't that big. MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly. Exactly. MR. WATSON: I think we're seeing those kinds of potential changes and positive changes within our community. A little openness to change will be there. I'll also say that as a community grows and changes, there has to be a willingness to reach out to new people in the community. I'm not going to have any family roots in Eastern Tennessee but can you reach out to me and engage me in the community? Is it wide enough? Do you have space in your circle to allow me in? I think that's one of the biggest challenges that I see whether I'm in Arizona, Montana, whatever. I found in Montana that folks with Texas backgrounds clung together up there. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? MR. WATSON: Not because the Montanans didn't but the Montanans all had family. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: The family's keeping me engaged. We don't have enough room for you in the circle. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. That's common though. MR. WATSON: Yeah. MR. MCDANIEL: That's common here in Oak Ridge. MR. WATSON: It's very common. The thing is that people are wanting to be engaged in a community. The best way to be engaged is in to be somebody's home or to be welcomed into a church or a club or an organization so that they feel good. Now if you think about the Department of Energy folks, what type of folks are coming into a job with the Department of Energy? They're not probably promoted out of Oak Ridge High School and then straight into the Department of Energy. Many of those folks, we’ll call them orphans, that are coming into the community or we're welcoming them into the community enough that Oak Ridge becomes their home community. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Exactly. Exactly. MR. WATSON: I think that that's an area that we can work on. I've asked leadership groups that question. I said, "When did you talk to an orphan and invite them into your group?" MR. MCDANIEL: It goes back to what happened historically, years ago in the original Oak Ridge. They all came- MR. WATSON: From everywhere. MR. MCDANIEL: From everywhere in their 20's and they were here. People later would say, "Well, I'm a newbie to Oak Ridge. I've only been here for 35 years." That was the mindset for a lot of those older folks. MR. WATSON: I think one of the things that can happen with communities is engaging folks within that community. This community is broader. Folks come here to shop. You can go to a restaurant. You can look around and there's nobody that you know. Okay. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. MR. WATSON: Having these events and things that establish us as an important community in the region really become important because we're still too small. We see that community on Friday night at Blankenship Field. Yet we see it but are we doing it? MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: It takes a concerted effort for that. What would people say outside of the community about Oak Ridge? MR. MCDANIEL: About us. MR. WATSON: We're our best ambassador. "Hey, I live in a great community. When are you coming out here to join me?" MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly. Exactly. MR. WATSON: I will share this one little tidbit of observation. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right. MR. WATSON: I note that in the region that folks will particularly say is that I'm going all the way out to Oak Ridge. They never say I'm going all the way out to Maryville. I'm going all the way out to Alcoa, but they are going all the way out to Oak Ridge. Okay. Where did that little idiosyncrasy come from? Was it the Manhattan Project? Because I was going all the way out to Oak Ridge? That's still in the let's come today by Knoxvillians. When they talk about going all the way out to Oak Ridge. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MR. WATSON: If we are to be a successful community and we need those people to come and work and have jobs here and even buy homes and build here, but they've got to be engaged. The American Museum of Science and Energy needs to be their museum not just an Oak Ridge's museum. The Children's Museum needs to be part of their importance in the region. We can no longer afford to have people be going all the way out to our community. They need to just move to our community. If you go to any metropolitan area, you just go to Plano. You just go to Grapevine. I'm going to Fort Worth tonight to go to the theater. You think nothing about it but this one has a little bit of a distinct difference. That can create exclusion when you really need inclusion. MR. MCDANIEL: Do you think it's a legacy? That's part of our legacy from being a fenced community during the war? MR. WATSON: I think we can use that as a cop out. MR. MCDANIEL: Really? MR. WATSON: I think we can use that as a cop out, but then I think we can use that as a reason to make ourselves better. I would imagine, I hear the stories about Cobb County. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. Yeah. Sure. MR. WATSON: I can't just go to Cobb County and be immediately engaged with the folks there. I don't think I cannot with government tags on the plate. MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly. Exactly. MR. WATSON: I think if you are able to take a tie in, I spoke to a young man the other day who was an intern at Oak Ridge National Lab. We were taking a class together at University of Tennessee where I'm working on my doctorate degree. This young man found out what I did. He said, "Oh, you're the city manager. Where is Oak Ridge?" MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? MR. WATSON: He said, "Where's the city?" I said, "Well, you come out the gate and you take a left." It got me to thinking, if you work at the Oak Ridge National Lab, you don't ever have to come into the community. MR. MCDANIEL: That's true. MR. WATSON: You have to know, I'm going to turn on Scarboro Road to come up into the community but I will never have to go. All I see is the Solway Bridge coming in and going out. I never am engaged in the community. We expect as Oak Ridgers that they are part of our community and we don't understand why. They're not necessarily engaged. Let's say that's 50% or 70% that are commuting in and commuting out but not having to- MR. MCDANIEL: Never come into town. MR. WATSON: They never come into town. What does that mean that we have to do those other 30% that are out there at the Lab? Who are they? What are they saying to the people at the Laboratory? We can get those folks to live here. It can be exciting to live here. We're seeing a 100% occupancy in our apartment complexes. We need more apartments being built. There are the folks that want to ride their bikes and go over to Haw Ridge. We've got to integrate those folks into the daily fabric of the community. That's where I think shopping and a center of town makes a lot of difference. I think our promotion through festivals and concerts does a lot more. That's what people are looking for. We have to be ready for them and we have to make sure that they will continue the lifespan of our community because we don't want to make the decision of not having another college in Stamford, Texas. MR. MCDANIEL: What a great way to wrap this up. Mark, thank you so much for coming in and talking about your story and your history and your life and also, your thoughts about Oak Ridge. You've been here long enough to know what Oak Ridge and who Oak Ridge is. I think you have a unique perspective being the City Manager and also being someone who's involved daily on all the aspects of who Oak Ridge is. MR. WATSON: We've got a bright future. I think there are wonderful possibilities. We definitely have the brains and the minds that are going to take science into the future. We can make that fun and a lifestyle that continues that creativity. It all begins with each of us as individuals to spread that sense of community. MR. MCDANIEL: All right. Very good. Thank you so much. MR. WATSON: All right.
[End of Interview]
[Editor’s Note: Portions of this transcript have been edited at Mr. Watson’s request. The corresponding audio and video components have remained unchanged.]

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ORAL HISTORY OF MARK WATSON
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
December 19, 2016
MR. MCDANIEL: This is Keith McDaniel. Today is December the 19th, 2016. I am at my studio here in Oak Ridge with Mark Watson. Mark, thank you for coming in to talk with me. MR. WATSON: Great to be with you today, Keith. MR. MCDANIEL: Mark is our current City Manager for the City of Oak Ridge. You've had that job for a number of years. We'll get to that. MR. WATSON: Okay. MR. MCDANIEL: Let's start at the beginning, at your beginning. Tell me where you were born and raised, something about your family. MR. WATSON: I think I was raised all over the place but I was born actually in Boone County, Missouri, in the City of Columbia. My family are natives of that particular region since 1808, about a year after the Lewis and Clark expedition. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? MR. WATSON: Our land is still in the family going back to that time. I've actually seen the deed and it was signed by President Martin Van Buren. MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. MR. WATSON: We're one of the oldest families with a continuous farm in the state of Missouri. MR. MCDANIEL: You grew up on a farm, farm boy. Do you have brothers and sisters? MR. WATSON: I didn't grew up on that farm. MR. MCDANIEL: You didn't? MR. WATSON: No. MR. MCDANIEL: You were born there. MR. WATSON: My family's roots are all there. My father was one of the first members of our family that broke the cycle of education and got out. He got a degree from University of Missouri and also is a City Manager and went to the University of Kansas in the City Management Program after a short stint in the Air Force. That's when I was born. I actually have had a City Manager's child's life and lived in numerous cities over my childhood. I have lived in six different cities in Texas, Oklahoma, Iowa and Kansas during my childhood. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Where did you live the longest? MR. WATSON: I think the longest place that we lived was probably Muskogee, Oklahoma, about six years. MR. MCDANIEL: Really? MR. WATSON: Then I lived a few years in Lawrence, Kansas, which is where my mother lives today. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MR. WATSON: I go back to Lawrence quite often and have a number of family members around there. Our branch of the family left the hometown and ended up tracking down on our own. MR. MCDANIEL: Where did you graduate high school? MR. WATSON: I'm a graduate of Lawrence High School in Lawrence, Kansas. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MR. WATSON: Class 1972 with a class of about 450 graduates in my class. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right. Now, am I mistaken? There's not a DOE [Department of Energy] site in Lawrence is there or close to it? MR. WATSON: No. MR. MCDANIEL: No. MR. WATSON: There's a major university there, university town with University of Kansas but not a Department of Energy. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right. For some reason, I thought that. As I see it, did you have brothers and sisters growing up? MR. WATSON: I have three other siblings, three brothers. They all live in the Kansas City area. MR. MCDANIEL: Are they older? Younger? MR. WATSON: They're all younger than I am. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MR. WATSON: I was the eldest. There's about a 10-year spread between all four of us. MR. MCDANIEL: In high school, obviously, education was important to your family. I'm sure it was expected for you to go to college and you probably intended to do that. Did you know what you wanted to do with your life? MR. WATSON: I think we all start out and try to find our niche and what we like to do. Actually, my undergraduate career started out in English Literature. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MR. WATSON: I got actively engaged in some innovative, creative teaching classes and an integrated humanities program, which had a resounding effect on me and how I work with people and how I appreciate what we do as a country, as citizens. I've always enjoyed learning from that aspect. I think as I got into my senior year in college, I started to plan. "Okay. What's the next step?" I was probably on the law school path then I got detoured in my final semester. My senior year, I took six months overseas to study in Ireland, the Republic at that time, and went there for studying and continuing in Irish literature and other types of things. I was going to take the LSAT [Law School Admissions Test] exam one more time and decided not to. I thought that my forte was working with people and actually talking to them. Not dealing necessarily with the law. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: I applied for the Masters in Public Administration Program. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MR. WATSON: First in Kansas and went there and continued my studies when I returned from overseas. MR. MCDANIEL: You said your father was a city manager. MR. WATSON: Yeah. MR. MCDANIEL: You traveled a lot. You moved a lot. Did that make you think twice about Public Administration? MR. WATSON: I think that ever since I was a small child, I was taking care of city business from the standpoint of phone calls and helping people. The unique aspect of local government is that it is the one that's closest to the people, the one that affects people. You can actually have a very strong impact on people. I thought that that was more my forte as opposed to researching the law books and took that approach. I also observed my father in solving problems from Washington D.C., on back to the local level. How you had to manipulate and walk yourself through all the various political aspects of the job and the technical aspects. City manager, when you look at a job description of one, that the city manager is in charge of everything that the city does or does not do. You have to know every aspect of your work and how you can do it better. It's not only just efficiency and effectiveness but equity and fairness and all of those issues come into play. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: I think another influence was is that in 1970s when we moved to Lawrence, Kansas, and my father became City Manager at that point in time, he stayed there for a long time. He was there for 20 years and died of a sudden heart attack after a City Council meeting. You recognize the public-ness of how all this comes about. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. MR. WATSON: I think one of the things that we saw, that I observed from my father was his ability to work with the most disparate elements of a community and bring them together, to come to conclusions and accomplishments as a community, and rebuilding a community and changing the way it will work for the future. If you don't ever make those decisions in a community, the world will pass you by. Some of the communities that I've looked at, I always go back to their histories and try to decide: what are those defining moments in the history of the community? I think if you look at let's say Lawrence, Kansas, for a minute, you might find that in 1863 when William Quantrill took a number of confederate renegades over from Missouri and killed 165 men. That was a defining moment in the history of that community. You can look at all of the communities that I've served over time and you'll find those moments. For instance, there was a critical decision in the first town that I was City Manager in Stamford, Texas, a small town out in West Texas. If you look up in the Almanac in 1925, city of Stamford had more miles of brick streets than the city of Fort Worth. MR. MCDANIEL: Really? MR. WATSON: Because they were progressive, they moved ahead. Adopted the council manager form of government in 1918 when it had only been formed in 1912. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MR. WATSON: They were a leading community out there but they got to a point where they needed to make a decision. A new college wanted to come to town. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. MR. WATSON: They decided that they really didn't need another college in town. They already had two. That was enough. Today, the city of Stamford is a dying community, fading away but that college turned into Texas Tech. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? MR. WATSON: Lubbock is now 275,000 people. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. MR. WATSON: These decisions we make are critical and sometimes we don't know how good they are, when they come to us face to face. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. Yeah. That is true. I guess you're able to learn a lot from your father just by watching him and watching him relate to people. Probably that was as much an education for you as your professional training was, I would say. MR. WATSON: I think one of the things that you look at from a professional training standpoint is there's lot of book learning that you can get but at the same time, there is also the practicum street and how some of these things come about. The sympathy that you have for somebody who has had all their belongings destroyed and lost in a tornado. What do you do with flooding year after year? What do you do about discrimination in your community? When I grew up, one thing that was a powerful influence in 1970 was the heart of the Vietnam era, and I was fortunate that I wasn't drafted. I was Number 325, I think, in the draft, so I didn't have to go anywhere, but at the same time, it was a horrible situation to grow up in. Our community blew up with racial politics in the Vietnam War era. Even in my high school, our high school had fallen backwards when we had full race riots. Inside of a week, there were five people killed within the community. I went to school with National Guard, had 200 National Guards in there to ensure your safety while you were in school. We had training the years after I was in school for race relations. We also had big Native American population where there was also the discrimination aspects that came into play. MR. MCDANIEL: This was in Lawrence, right? MR. WATSON: This was in Lawrence, Kansas. When you observe all of that and people are getting shot at and the rule of law fades away, you can see how closely and delicate we are as a community and as a country. It can affect everybody very rapidly. I remind people that as we go through some of these cycles that we're basically repeating our history. You have to call upon folks like myself to recall some of these and say, "You know, we've seen discrimination before. It wasn't just in Selma, Alabama. It was in other places." You have to make critical decisions like Oak Ridge did when they desegregated their schools and took that ploy. Now the original mayor of Oak Ridge lost his job because of that decision. Somebody has to make that decision and they're critical for your community to move on. MR. MCDANIEL: I would imagine just based on your comments there that being a student of history is a very valuable thing for a public servant. MR. WATSON: Well, it is. I think if you go back into the history books of a community, you can find out what has transpired and what directions the community is taking. Are they an independent community? They can be proud of their heritage but does that heritage drag them down as an anchor? MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: We remember the good old days. If you drove through the city of Stamford in Texas in 1957, '58 and '59, they were the state champions in football. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: Those were the good old days but those 1950s drag them down. They would lose their momentum as a community. You have to remember that you can move ahead and you have to make a change in your form of government and your activities that you're involved with and to make sure that it's good for your community as a whole. I've had the opportunity through my career to work in four states now. I worked in Texas. MR. MCDANIEL: Stamford, right? MR. WATSON: Stamford was- MR. MCDANIEL: Stamford was your first. MR. WATSON: Yeah. I actually didn't start right out in the city management seat. I spent four years learning the trade and working with some great city managers. I worked with a man by the name of Leland Nelson in University Park, Texas. I got straight out of school. He said, "I want you to go run a department for me." MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MR. WATSON: I tried that and then I got my first job and went to Wichita Falls, Texas and I was able to work under a guy by the name of Jerry Fox, who later was the County Manager of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, for many, many years and shaped what Charlotte is today as a community. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? MR. WATSON: I worked under him. He's a great mentor and actually, he was a classmate of my father's in college. We spent some time there. One of the things I experienced in 1979 under his watch was the third largest tornado on record at the time in the United States in 1979. That particular tornado came through, killed 45 people. MR. MCDANIEL: Where was that? MR. WATSON: Wichita Falls, Texas. MR. MCDANIEL: Wichita Falls, okay. MR. WATSON: Killed 45 people, was 11 miles on the ground in the city. I think at the time it destroyed basically $100 million worth of property. MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. MR. WATSON: Immediately displaced 30,000 people. As you experienced that, just this last week, watching what's happening in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and the wildfires up there. They're in for a long haul because I saw that. I've experienced that. You just don't rebuild tomorrow. It'll take years. It'll take years for them to get back to where they were, but there's a chance and an opportunity in that tragedy, to be able to build back better and safer and correctly. That's the important thing that we really have to remember when some of these tragedies hit us, they actually can be opportunities. I think that has had a profound experience on me in how I approach things. I'm not afraid to rebuild in a different way or approach something that needs a change. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: You have to be able to try to address it and just because the road’s there, maybe that's not the right place for the road. Maybe that's a better place for a new apartment complex or something. MR. MCDANIEL: The status quo I guess is not going to last very long. You're either going forward or you're going backward. It's not going to stay where you are. MR. WATSON: That's right. You got to remember. Everything's always in a constant state of change. That's the only certain thing is change out there. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. MR. WATSON: New generations are going to move on. There's history, of course, that has to be maintained but then the history also needs to match up with what the future is of the community. I think that's very essential when you talk about managing a community these days. MR. MCDANIEL: Your first city manager job was with Stamford, Texas. MR. WATSON: Yes. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. Where did you go from there? MR. WATSON: I spent four years in Stamford, which was a cotton, oil and cattle community out in West Texas. Then I went on an adventure and I took the City Manager's job of Mission, Texas, which was in far South Texas in the Rio Grande. I was closer to major cities in Mexico than I was to cities in the United States. MR. MCDANIEL: Did you feel like you were out in the middle of nowhere? MR. WATSON: No. I felt like I was a minority definitely along the Rio Grande. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: It was a bilingual community. We had a lot of winter folks that came down and visited. Basically, it was a city of about 30,000. It would double in the winter time. It was based on tourism and also agriculture, the great fruit industry was central and core to that area. Five miles to the south, I was in another nation. You would spend a lot of time working in an international environment. That was very helpful to me. My council meetings would switch from English to Spanish and back to the English again. There was a constant change but we worked very, very well together and accomplished a number of major changes while I was there. MR. MCDANIEL: Were you fluent in Spanish? MR. WATSON: I was not. I was fluent in French. I'll throw out a French word here and there. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. MR. WATSON: If I didn't know the word, I might throw out the word “biblioteca” from the library and the Spanish equivalent of “biblioteca” would come up and they would know what I was talking about. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure. Sure. MR. WATSON: I actually taught myself Spanish with some of the folks there. We were able to converse quite well. I still can switch languages pretty easily today. MR. MCDANIEL: How long were you in Mission? MR. WATSON: I spent another four years in Mission. It was a great environment. We were building a new railroad bridge across the river into Mexico. A lot of industrial development activity that was occurring in that area. Worked with the agricultural industry and learned how the grapefruit industry worked and as a city, we had to treat a lot of their affluent and acetic affluent as they're making orange juice and grapefruit juice and those kinds of things. You gain experience as you go through those types of environments. I think the other thing that I would find down there is working with multi-cultural community: we could spend a lot of time in learning what some of the cultural norms were. We found that people, no matter how small the house or how incidental it was, it was theirs. The ownership was essential in that Spanish culture. As we would work with individuals, education was important to them and opportunity. We worked very closely with our industries and businesses to make sure those opportunities were there and presented themselves. After that, I was recruited to come up to the Dallas Fort Worth Metropolitan area. MR. MCDANIEL: Let me ask you a question before you get away from Mission. As they say undocumented workers, was that an issue? Was it the norm? MR. WATSON: It was never an issue really. I think when you look at undocumented issues, we had an open border back at that point in time. Mexican nationals could get a shopping cart to come over and shop and go back and forth across river. Most of the time, you'll find that with Mexican nationals there's not a desire to necessarily be in the United States. It's all part of the economics of that particular region. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: Then when you'd see programs such as NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement] that had been adopted in the Clinton administration, the idea was to make ourselves competitive on a worldwide basis. When you had folks in China that were working at 75 cents an hour, how does as a wiper blade company in Buffalo compete when their janitor is making $25 an hour? MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. MR. WATSON: A good example was, wiper blade company did move to South Texas and created some $10-an-hour jobs for some Americans and then they would do some assembly of wiper blades on the Mexican side at a dollar-and-a-quarter-an-hour and made those wiper blades competitive again. Okay. On a small scale, you have to look at how that international environment could work. They called them maquiladoras. The maquiladoras come from the verb maquillar, which is “to assemble.” If you were assembling seat belts for Ford, do you do that at $25 an hour in Dearborn, Michigan? Do you do that with a neighboring country creating a stable job for them and allowing them to increase and improve their capacity on life? I think it's a very workable situation as you look at it from a job standpoint. MR. MCDANIEL: I just wondered because I would imagine being that close to the border that it was like there almost wasn't a border. You had lots of come and go between folks in that area. MR. WATSON: Yeah. I think the thing was and we'll get into that because I've lived on the border in two different locations. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right. MR. WATSON: I think that when you look at how that situation works, you're creating jobs that are of value. They help the North American economy and also help us in a worldwide economy. The undocumented alien is the one that is heading up to work with a roofing company in Atlanta or so. We created that. We created that situation but one of the things that we concentrate on is our State Department has a lot of responsibility for that. The State Department, instead of working on treaties and requirements with the nation of Mexico, we spend a lot of time over in the Middle East and Jordan and Syria, wherever. When in fact, we probably should get our house in order with our neighbors to the south because one thing that the Mexican Constitution has that's different than the United States Constitution is that every three years, every elected official in the nation of Mexico has to leave their position. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? MR. WATSON: They can run for another position but they can't run for the same. Imagine that if everybody is term limited out. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, absolutely. MR. WATSON: The entire nation goes so there is no history of government. As a consequence, you have that change out, which makes it very difficult for the nation to do that. In the meantime, if you're trying to get something accomplished at the national level, you've only got two terms, which is six years to get it done with the president before a new president comes into play. That's it. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Exactly. Exactly. All right. You went to Dallas, Fort Worth. MR. WATSON: Went up to Dallas, Fort Worth and I was asked to be with the City of Grapevine, Texas. Grapevine is known as the location for the Dallas, Fort Worth Airport. All of the terminals are located in the city limits of Grapevine. MR. MCDANIEL: That's north, almost center. MR. WATSON: It's in the center between Dallas and Fort Worth, right in the middle. MR. MCDANIEL: Yes, sure. MR. WATSON: Anyway, a small town of about 30,000 and then with millions of visitors. 700,000 takeoffs and landings every year located at that particular airport. I gained experience working with an airport facility. We were involved with the Dallas Fort Worth Airport expansion project, which was just an incredible, multi-billion dollar, multi-decade improvement project. I can go back today and see some of those improvements that were planned out in 1990. MR. MCDANIEL: When were you there? MR. WATSON: I was there from '89 to '92. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MR. WATSON: Okay. At that time, the town was also growing immensely. A lot of the residents were pilots that would live in Grapevine, worked for Delta, worked for American Airlines. Spent a lot of time with those types of business entities, had a small- MR. MCDANIEL: Let me ask you a question. I'm sorry. I don't mean to interrupt. MR. WATSON: Yeah. MR. MCDANIEL: You went there in '89. Was there anything that you had to deal with concerned with the airport because I think it was just in '86, three years earlier was when they had that devastating Delta crash? MR. WATSON: Yeah, the L-1011 crash? MR. MCDANIEL: Yes. Yes. MR. WATSON: That pre-dated me by a couple of years but it affected a lot of our planning because as we talked about the clear zones in and around an airport, there were particular areas that we were concerned about. When we looked at the expansion of the airport with the new outward runways coming into play, because the anticipated growth for Dallas Fort Worth was tremendous and they wanted to expand that airport. We said, "Look at these clear zones. Look at the L-1011 crash. How do we protect ourselves?" MR. MCDANIEL: There's a team down on the interstate or something or road- MR. WATSON: Yeah. You can have the road crossing an airport runway. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. MR. WATSON: You're not going to protect yourself from that. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure. MR. WATSON: When it comes to housing and expansion, which then in fact, housing, we had an elementary school that would have been dead center in the middle of a proposed runway. How are we going to address that? Are we going to move concentrated area, people out of that area, which we eventually did. MR. MCDANIEL: The reason I brought that up is I was living in Dallas when that happened. I remember sitting and watching the news, the last five minutes of the nightly newscast. That came on and it stayed on until midnight, I guess. They broadcast. I remember that very vividly. MR. WATSON: When you see those kinds of incidents happen, it heightens your awareness of what you need to do next. As I've dealt with community there, there was a lot of re-development that needed to occur. They were just a small city at the time. Today, that city has grown in its office and service and tourism environment. It's a great community. They've done some good things. MR. MCDANIEL: Now, after Grapevine, where did you go? MR. WATSON: After Grapevine, I was recruited to go to Billings, Montana. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MR. WATSON: Billings, Montana, is the largest city in Montana. A lot of people don't really realize how big Montana is but if I were to put the northwest corner in Chicago, the southeast corner would be in Washington D.C. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Wow. MR. WATSON: You put that in scale. MR. MCDANIEL: That's huge. MR. WATSON: It's huge. We were the largest city in Montana. You could go up on the cliffs above the town and look down. You could probably see about 15% of the entire state's population in one place. MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. Yeah. MR. WATSON: It was a large city. It had a ward system. I was the City Administrator of the city. Everybody basically reported to me, very strong governmental system. They had 11 city council members. Ten of them with two per ward for five different wards. We work very hard on downtown re-development. Downtown was sluggish at that time, as many people see. I was there from '93 until '99. I was able to deal with a lot of the re-planning of the downtown area, the re-development of the railroad depot area and old historic structures that were in that area. Also, we're dealing with a lot of environmental issues with sewage lines into new areas. We had a great water plant and sewage system. One of the best utility operators that I've ever worked with and this guy was just absolutely incredible. He said, "You're going to take a little bit of pain and heat but we're not going to have broken water lines and we're going to have a system that works." MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: He was able to recover about 93% of the water that was pumped out. The system was in place. MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. MR. WATSON: If I compare that today to Oak Ridge, we only recover about 70% of what's pumped out. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. MR. WATSON: This guy just had an incredible knack for knowing which thing to fix at the right time and the right investment and working very well. Of course, we were dealing with Yellowstone River. We had to be very cognizant of environmental degradation that might be associated with that. This was a large community so it really had to have large industrial-scale type facilities. MR. MCDANIEL: Was that a time of growth for Billings? Was it really a time of things were wearing out so you're going to have to rebuild and- MR. WATSON: I think it was a calm before the growth really would hit Montana. There weren't a lot of jobs at Montana. You can't move there and expect to just find something. You had a lot of returning folks from Montana that would go back. For instance, I think in the whole state, there were about 250 engineers. You had to wait for one of those engineers whether they were mechanical or civil, to leave or die. MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly. MR. WATSON: Then you could come in and fill one of those voids. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. Yeah. MR. WATSON: There just wasn't that much work. The work ethic was different there. Unlike Texas for instance, you work because you have to work. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. MR. WATSON: In Montana, you work as a necessary evil so that you can enjoy the riches of Montana. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MR. WATSON: You work to get off work. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: In Montana, people didn't talk about their jobs at a Christmas party. They talked about what they did last week and the big trout they caught or the elk that they were able to hunt and those kinds of things. So, a different attitude. I think that gave me another appreciation for the differences that you might find from place to place. We had a wonderful time. It was a great place to raise kids. I know that our Deputy Fire Chief is now the Fire Chief in Bozeman, Montana. He's left Tennessee to go there and I think that will be a great experience for him. MR. MCDANIEL: Where did you go after Billings? MR. WATSON: After Billings, I had the Texans call me back. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MR. WATSON: I was asked to come down to a community in central Texas, name of Temple, Texas. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: Temple is about 60,000 people at the time. It was a medical-based community. There were three very large hospitals, Scott & White [Memorial Hospital], King’s Daughters National Veterans Hospital, fourth largest veteran’s hospital in the system. Then there was also Texas A&M Hospital. All of that with 1200 doctors, I think, in the city. MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. MR. WATSON: It'd be much like Rochester, Minnesota, and the Mayo Clinic. Our city in Temple was really in the league-leading aspects of medicine and medical research. We established, one of the things that we accomplished while I was there, was the first biomedical research district in the state of Texas and in the nation. We were able to address those issues in establishing places where research would come and have the financial incentives, much like you would have with an industrial park. This was all bio-med. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Right. MR. WATSON: Being creative like that, you have an ability to enhance the economic capacity of your community as a whole. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: By looking at something differently. I think we got involved with national security. President Bush was in office at the time. That hospital, Scott & White Hospital was the hospital that we had to take care of if the President were to need hospital care. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? MR. WATSON: While he was down south. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: His ranch was a few miles from us. He would come in and have checkups or he would have tests and all kinds of things were all done there. If he were laid up to, then we had security measures that we had to accommodate like how can he escape from a fourth story room and get out of the hospital, if something bad were to occur? MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. Yeah. MR. WATSON: We would use our ladder truck to serve as a rescue device to pull the President should that type of thing happen. MR. MCDANIEL: I imagine Secret Service in your city worked together very closely on some of those things. MR. WATSON: We did. We spent a lot of time dealing with that. One of the fun things we did in Temple while I was there was build the first child designed playground that I've been involved with, which was the playground that we built down along the railroad tracks, Whistle Stop Park. This was designed by kids and developed much like our Cedar Hill Park here in Oak Ridge. We worked with the company that did that. My wife and I really enjoyed spending that time working on those kinds of events. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: The project went really well and was part of an entire renovation of an area along the railroad tracks that's created a wonderful park. There's a railroad museum and a restoration, did a $5 million restoration of the 1901 of Arlington Northern Depot. All in green marble and wood, just an exquisite example of the good old days when trains were king. We really worked hard on renovating a sleepy old town that had seen some of its luster wear off. Today I think it's fairly strong with a lot of public investment in public facilities back into the community. MR. MCDANIEL: After Temple. MR. WATSON: After Temple, went on to another new adventure out in Yuma, Arizona. A city of about 100,000 population out on the Mexico, Arizona, California border. MR. MCDANIEL: Yes. They are the border town. MR. WATSON: Yeah. It was a river boat town originally. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. MR. WATSON: It was a crossing of the Colorado River back when they were no crossings because of a canyon, Grand Canyon upstream. All of that soil that came out of that Grand Canyon is now in Yuma, Arizona. Again, with agricultural markets, we spent a lot of time working with the farming industry there, the corporate farming industry and saw some really fascinating management techniques as to providing the foods that the United States eats during all the winter months. MR. MCDANIEL: We're talking big farming. MR. WATSON: We're talking big farming. MR. MCDANIEL: Huge farming, yeah. MR. WATSON: About 700,000 acres on the Arizona-side, combine that with Imperial Valley another 700,000 acres and another 600,000 acres in Mexico. All of that area is feeding Canada and the United States during the winter months. MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly. Exactly. MR. WATSON: When you're dealing with that, you have to have good transportation systems. You have to make sure that they can get the product to market. You can imagine every shipper coming in and picking up everything from lemons to wheat to corn to whatever. All that is done. MR. MCDANIEL: I would imagine there is a huge train system through there. Wouldn't it? MR. WATSON: Not enough time. They're not fast enough. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? MR. WATSON: Not fast enough because Walmart may say, "I need to have 12,000 tons of lettuce." They come in to get that 12,000 tons of lettuce on a certain day. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MR. WATSON: They're expecting that so they have to have a field that is ready on December 12th to go to market. They're picking that up and it's going to Des Moines, to Seattle, to Tampa. It will travel all night and it will be there in the next morning. That's their delivery system. It has to work. Transportation becomes really critical for community as a whole.
In Yuma again, on the border, you're dealing with large agencies. There are 50 different federal agencies in the border area there. Particularly in the customs and immigration and border patrol, all of those angles. When I arrived there, it was a very critical and that we were having a lot of intrusion into the United States with illegal entry. They would actually come to Yuma first and try to go on to Vegas or San Diego or Phoenix but they would have to get across the border. We would have some very horrendous situations where there were crashes and they'd pile 16 people into a Suburban and make a dash for it. There was a chase in town and you'd have intersections and accidents. It's really, really a mess. One of the things that President Bush did was put together the fencing program that really worked very, very well. At the time, we had, in 2005, there were 165,000 arrests and apprehensions going through that 70-mile wide sector of the United States border. After the fencing was put into play, that dropped to 300 or less. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? MR. WATSON: Yeah. MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. MR. WATSON: Huge investment but saved a lot of time as far as the United States was concerned. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure. Sure. MR. WATSON: There were great opportunities for the winter visitors that were there because they could go across to Mexico and have those that were uninsured in the health insurance and all. Many would go over and get treatments. They would get medicines. They could do that at a nominal cost as opposed to an American cost. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: Many of the doctors in this one little town near by (it's called Algodones) was a medical town. You could go in there and get your crowns replaced. You could get new eye prescriptions or new hearing aids or any of that kind of stuff. There was a whole health market. MR. MCDANIEL: At a fraction cost. MR. WATSON: At 25%. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. Sure. MR. WATSON: You could get your teeth cleaned for 20 bucks. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? MR. WATSON: Yeah. MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. MR. WATSON: When you have that kind of engagement, you could begin to see what national policies were like. A lot of people would come through there from a traveling standpoint or trying to get to points beyond, but I think what we saw is that the border can be repaired. The poor person that's on one side of the border in Mexico, not only has to have the permissions of the United States government to get in here but they have to have the permissions of the Mexican government to leave. The Mexican government has somebody that's earning $100 a month have to travel to the capital of the province. They would go to Sonora on a 10-mile or 10-hour bus trip. They'd have to do that four times to get their permit so that they could go. Each time, that would cost them $100. Four months of their annual wage was used to get a necessary permit. The incentive was to ignore it. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, ignore it. Try to get across. MR. WATSON: Get across. We're all guilty in this a little bit in the regulations and stuff that go with it. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, so after Yuma. MR. WATSON: After Yuma, we had a political change in the political climate particularly border communities are fairly turbulent sometimes. I felt like we reached that stage where it was going south. I'd done all that I could do. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. MR. WATSON: Took time out. I said, "I'll just sit back and let's see where the tea leaves fall." MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: The lobbyist for Yuma, Arizona, was actually the lobbyist for Oak Ridge, Tennessee. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? MR. WATSON: That's how we got connected. I ended up coming to Oak Ridge. I have never lived east of the Mississippi before. We decided to take a look at it and anyway, went through a long selection process, an orderly process done by the Oak Ridge City Council and all. I was selected out of a group of four or five, I believe. It felt right and it felt like we could match up pretty well. I had something to offer to the community and took the job in August of 2010. MR. MCDANIEL: 2010, so over six years now. MR. WATSON: Yes. MR. MCDANIEL: Yes, over six years now. Talk about your biggest challenges. Maybe some of your biggest surprises just in Oak Ridge maybe compared to some of the other places that you've served. MR. WATSON: I think one of the interesting things, we talk a lot about the Department of Energy. Yeah. We have a close symbiotic relationship with the Department of Energy and all of the facets that they do. I guess one thing that surprised me was the separateness of the community with the department. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MR. WATSON: Some of that separation I think has evolved over the years. You built the Pellissippi Parkway that opened up broad expanses of land and commuting possibilities. You've had the change that has occurred. I think it's been really a challenge for the community to wrap their arms around it to say, "How come somebody doesn't want to live here? How come somebody is leaving here and going elsewhere?" I think one of the things that you have to do is we are no different than Stamford, Texas, or Yuma, Arizona, as we have to create an environment in which it is attractive to people and that they want to live here. They can feel safe. They can bring their kids up in a good school system and we begin to see that all happening now. We've had some significant change over in six years. You got a new City Manager. You got a new school superintendent. You got new leaders and contractors associated with Department of Energy. I think you've seen transition and change over in the city councils and stability with the Board of Education. I think all of that's helped us align with some particular directions. I think as you look at the Department of Energy, one surprising thing (and I worked with several military bases in my career) there was a Marine Corps airbase in Yuma. There was an Army base in Yuma. There was Fort Hood in Temple, Texas. I was working with the border patrols in those different areas. I felt the relationship is totally different with them than and the desire to work with the community as you see with the Department of Energy. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure. MR. WATSON: Okay. If you go through a BRAC [Base Realignment and Closure] process with the Department of Defense, one of the aspects of that is how well does the community support your activities? They don't have to go through BRAC with Department of Energy. Sometimes, that relationship is not there. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MR. WATSON: It's just little things that you might see such as the Vice President is coming to town and taking a tour of the Oak Ridge National Lab. He's in your city limits. The Mayor's not invited to attend. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MR. WATSON: There's some distance there. I think I've worked hard to bring that distance closer together, to get us engaged. It's also has to be constantly reinforced, because in a way, you have a military-base aspect to the Department of Defense facilities or the Department of Energy facilities. As you see those activities going on, we really have to work together differently and establish continuity in those relationships. I think we're slowly getting there. MR. MCDANIEL: It was something you mentioned earlier, I think you're right on target with that, it has evolved to where it is today. I know historically in the early days, it was a very close connection between the DOE facilities and the city and the people and the town. MR. WATSON: Right. MR. MCDANIEL: They would encourage their employees to run for city council, to be a part of the community, to do things in the community. It's different now. MR. WATSON: That's different now. A bank president used to work for the city council but the bank may look at whether that gains them any value, to be on the city council. Do they lose accounts because they're making controversial decisions? I think those are some of the challenges that you see today. I encourage a city council member to really look at where they want to go. What little contribution do they want to make in their four short years on the city council? Then do they try to guide in that particular direction? It may be the renovation of a park. It may be the CSX bike trail. It may be developing something on the waterfront, all of those things. Then we get into a sequence where we're making continuous progress toward those goals. I think that's been an essential element for some of the success. MR. MCDANIEL: As city manager and as council, like you said, you want to make process, gradually process and things will take placement. There's lots of different specific areas that you have to look at. MR. WATSON: Yeah. MR. MCDANIEL: I've talked to a lot of people about why do people not live here? There's lots of reasons. One of the significant ones is the housing market. That certainly plays a role in it. It may not be the only thing but it certainly plays so you got that. Then on the flip side of that, you got this incredible, tremendous school system that they want their kids to attend. MR. WATSON: Sure. As you look at community and you see this in a metropolitan area. You have all levels of economics. You've got all levels of ethnicities. You've got all levels of education. When you're in a community like that, you will find that people will cluster together with like people. For instance in Grapevine, Texas, 92% of the people had a four-year college degree. Okay. That doesn't leave much room for the GED [General Education Diploma] crowd. MR. MCDANIEL: Eight percent. Yeah, sure. MR. WATSON: The GEDs might have been very comfortable in Mesquite. You get these different variations as to where you live. In a community that's small and independent such as Oak Ridge, you begin to see all of those demographics all at once, on a smaller scale. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. MR. WATSON: Blending those becomes really important. A house that I got in that was built 70 years ago, that's 1400 square feet and is really big to perhaps a 90-year old. MR. MCDANIEL: That's okay. That's all right. MR. WATSON: Shall we pause? MR. MCDANIEL: We'll let the phone stop ringing. That's okay. Is that yours or mine? MR. WATSON: Mine. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. That's what I was thinking because I turned mine off. We don't have to. MR. WATSON: There it goes. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right. MR. WATSON: I think when you look at improving the community and you have people looking at things that come and expected to have, you can look into Year 2016 and the National Home Builder Association's average size of a house is 2200 square feet. We in our community have taken at least 40% of our housing off the market that's in a national norm. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: Okay. How can we make that better? Not everybody is going to like the tiny home trend. If you're like me and my family, sometimes we get more stuff every year. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, exactly. MR. WATSON: I think we have to balance that out and see how we can create a community that people desire to be in. We want to preserve the property values. That comes through us having rules. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: We have to have rules. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MR. WATSON: You may think it's normal to fix the engine of your pickup truck in the front yard. The neighbor next door doesn't. We have to decide whether we're going to allow that or not. That's something that the city councils really get into and have to try to figure that out. One of the things, you've asked about successes with Oak Ridge, I think we recently have proven that we can be successful with big projects such as Oak Ridge Main Street. We've had to force ourselves to look ahead. There were critical decisions made in the community that stopped the community. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MR. WATSON: Okay. When you petition and you say, "We don't like this project. Please stop it." How about a little foresight as to why you're stopping that and what the cost benefit of stopping it is? I estimate that the Oak Ridge Mall that laid dormant for 20 years probably cost this community $40 million. The bond issue to improve it was a $20 million bond issue. Were we smart? It's hard to tell, and the pundants will be able to debate that. I know today, that we're [the developer] spending $92 million to create the Oak Ridge Main Street project that will be updated in a new and different style than we've had in the past, with people living there, with retail and also the office space that will come in there. MR. MCDANIEL: I could be wrong here but it's similar to the city center plan to a certain degree. MR. WATSON: To a certain degree. MR. MCDANIEL: That the voters voted down the bond issue on. MR. WATSON: Absolutely. MR. MCDANIEL: Now it's costing us $92 million when we could have done it 15 years ago for $20 million. MR. WATSON: Maybe we would have had $20 million more in the pocket. MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly. Yeah. I can say that. You have to be more diplomatic on those things. MR. WATSON: I think I can be honest in the oral history. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, absolutely. MR. WATSON: Sometimes, we can't see the forest for the trees. It ends up being a cost for all of us. We are a small player when it comes to some of the systems that we have. For instance, we only have 15,000 in electrical customers but we're trying to maintain a system that covers 70 square miles. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: Okay. Some of our system is old because it was put in by federal forces and all, but when we look at replacing a substation, we're talking $6 million to do that and then nobody likes debt. We get worried about our bonded indebtedness and all. It really takes a balance for us to look at the decisions that we make as a community. The effect of making a non-decision can equally be as detrimental to the community. MR. MCDANIEL: Speaking of that, I'm not going to have you go into the whole water sewer system EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] issue, because I will just refer people to the oral history with Gary Cinder that I just did just a few days ago. He talked about that fairly extensively. I don't want to repeat that but that's an issue. That was an issue. MR. WATSON: Also an important issue and just like a car or a driveway. There's a certain amount of maintenance that you have to put into that car every year so that it hums. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. MR. WATSON: When the technology changes and so forth, you either got to upgrade that or you got to buy a new car. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Exactly. MR. WATSON: Those were some of the decisions that we see as being involved with our community. I think as we look at investing, it will have the investments that we are making now are going to have investments, future investments that will spin off of those that will continue to make us move ahead as a community. Some of our contracts will not be DOE contracts, but there will be new things such as the composite industry or 3D printing. We have to deal with the world market. As we're dealing with 3D printing and the raw materials that need to come into our community, but we'll get there slowly but surely and methodically. MR. MCDANIEL: Exclusive of the federal relationship, what have been the biggest challenges for being the city manager in Oak Ridge? MR. WATSON: I think one of the basic challenges that we've had is sometimes not knowing how to make a decision. When you tend to want to continuously delay or not get to a vote, we haven't been successful, because there will always be another reason why you can't or shouldn't or should delay. I think as we look at things, we need to be able to move forward. The professional staffs that we have in city government are some of the best around. I think we have to allow them to do their jobs and the council to take some of those recommendations and not rehash them but do the final enhancement and icing on the cake so that we can move forward. MR. MCDANIEL: Let the professionals do what the professionals do. MR. WATSON: Yeah. They are just as vested in the community. Today, I have all but one person of the senior staff lives in the community. That's been an important thing of mine. How can you be engaged if you don't live here? MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly. MR. WATSON: We're getting more and more of our lower staff levels to come into our community. We're looking at ways to make us a part of the community. I think that makes a lot of difference. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: I think as we begin to examine where Oak Ridge is going in the future, we've made good critical steps. We need to be open to development and redevelopment. We are landlocked. It doesn't seem like it but we are landlocked. There is no way that we can expand outwards. We have to be very smart in how we use our land inward. From a private sector standpoint, folks are not going to go and buy 100 lots like Kroger's did. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, sure. Exactly. Exactly. MR. WATSON: Okay. Not everybody is going to have the patience to do something like that. At the same time, we only have two major thoroughfares through our community. That's where your commercial growth is going to be. Visibility, being seen and so forth. Yet if we have somebody that wants to change a piece of property along those corridors, we fight them. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. MR. WATSON: We don’t need to be fighting the folks along those corridors, because today, your house backs up to where a Dollar General Store may be. MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly. Exactly. MR. WATSON: Okay. I think there has to be some acceptance of that, that if you're buying a house that's backing up to this lot, there may be a Dollar General Store on your future property. You need to recognize that. If we can save ourselves time to say that's accepted, then when somebody's ready to go, we can actively get that project up and running and producing sales tax and economics. That's bringing business into our community that's better for all of us. MR. MCDANIEL: I think a good example of some of that is the whole Aubrey's- MR. WATSON: Section? MR. MCDANIEL: All of this section why it goes a long that whole area right there and the whole strip now between all these and Weigel's. It wasn't there just a few years ago. It's very busy. MR. WATSON: That took our [city] incentive to say, "You know what? We could move our road." When we moved our road and then we said, we can put a stoplight here. Your property tax can pay for that stoplight and slow the traffic down out on the main drag. It's been a very successful venture. We expect the same thing with Oak Ridge Main Street. Perhaps some of the other projects that are further down the strip can do that. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: I think we've been successful in seeing those kinds of changes that occurred later. In a couple of weeks, we will be officially transferring land from the Department of Energy to the City of Oak Ridge, which will allow further development along Illinois Avenue. It will be important for that to go smoothly. That changes something like the AMSE [American Museum of Science and Energy] Building, but we're providing for space, new space, high quality space, $1.8 million worth of renovation and remodeling that they're eligible to do as opposed to the old building that has a $12,000 a month electrical utility bill. MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly. Exactly. MR. WATSON: If we can take those kinds of things and be open to what they might be in the future, then I think we got a bright opportunity. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: We have to look at what's essential for us to preserve in the community. We have a historical district that encompasses all of the legacy housing. We know we can't preserve all of that, but yet from a standpoint of that person assembling 10 of those and building three new homes and dealing with that. That may not be the best way to examine that. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure. MR. WATSON: Making our community better consistently and moving forward, I think we're on the right track. We've got a lot of land that's available for new housing. Maybe that housing doesn't need to be on postage stamps. It needs to be on decent sized lots, that can accommodate national norms of home building and we'll begin to see change continuously within our community. MR. MCDANIEL: We moved into this house almost 11 years ago. One of the most attractive things about it was that it's three quarters of an acre and it's flat. I had two young kids. I wanted a yard for my kids to play in. MR. WATSON: You couldn't do that up on Jefferson [Avenue]. MR. MCDANIEL: I couldn't. MR. WATSON: The lots aren't that big. MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly. Exactly. MR. WATSON: I think we're seeing those kinds of potential changes and positive changes within our community. A little openness to change will be there. I'll also say that as a community grows and changes, there has to be a willingness to reach out to new people in the community. I'm not going to have any family roots in Eastern Tennessee but can you reach out to me and engage me in the community? Is it wide enough? Do you have space in your circle to allow me in? I think that's one of the biggest challenges that I see whether I'm in Arizona, Montana, whatever. I found in Montana that folks with Texas backgrounds clung together up there. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? MR. WATSON: Not because the Montanans didn't but the Montanans all had family. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: The family's keeping me engaged. We don't have enough room for you in the circle. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. That's common though. MR. WATSON: Yeah. MR. MCDANIEL: That's common here in Oak Ridge. MR. WATSON: It's very common. The thing is that people are wanting to be engaged in a community. The best way to be engaged is in to be somebody's home or to be welcomed into a church or a club or an organization so that they feel good. Now if you think about the Department of Energy folks, what type of folks are coming into a job with the Department of Energy? They're not probably promoted out of Oak Ridge High School and then straight into the Department of Energy. Many of those folks, we’ll call them orphans, that are coming into the community or we're welcoming them into the community enough that Oak Ridge becomes their home community. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Exactly. Exactly. MR. WATSON: I think that that's an area that we can work on. I've asked leadership groups that question. I said, "When did you talk to an orphan and invite them into your group?" MR. MCDANIEL: It goes back to what happened historically, years ago in the original Oak Ridge. They all came- MR. WATSON: From everywhere. MR. MCDANIEL: From everywhere in their 20's and they were here. People later would say, "Well, I'm a newbie to Oak Ridge. I've only been here for 35 years." That was the mindset for a lot of those older folks. MR. WATSON: I think one of the things that can happen with communities is engaging folks within that community. This community is broader. Folks come here to shop. You can go to a restaurant. You can look around and there's nobody that you know. Okay. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. MR. WATSON: Having these events and things that establish us as an important community in the region really become important because we're still too small. We see that community on Friday night at Blankenship Field. Yet we see it but are we doing it? MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MR. WATSON: It takes a concerted effort for that. What would people say outside of the community about Oak Ridge? MR. MCDANIEL: About us. MR. WATSON: We're our best ambassador. "Hey, I live in a great community. When are you coming out here to join me?" MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly. Exactly. MR. WATSON: I will share this one little tidbit of observation. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right. MR. WATSON: I note that in the region that folks will particularly say is that I'm going all the way out to Oak Ridge. They never say I'm going all the way out to Maryville. I'm going all the way out to Alcoa, but they are going all the way out to Oak Ridge. Okay. Where did that little idiosyncrasy come from? Was it the Manhattan Project? Because I was going all the way out to Oak Ridge? That's still in the let's come today by Knoxvillians. When they talk about going all the way out to Oak Ridge. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MR. WATSON: If we are to be a successful community and we need those people to come and work and have jobs here and even buy homes and build here, but they've got to be engaged. The American Museum of Science and Energy needs to be their museum not just an Oak Ridge's museum. The Children's Museum needs to be part of their importance in the region. We can no longer afford to have people be going all the way out to our community. They need to just move to our community. If you go to any metropolitan area, you just go to Plano. You just go to Grapevine. I'm going to Fort Worth tonight to go to the theater. You think nothing about it but this one has a little bit of a distinct difference. That can create exclusion when you really need inclusion. MR. MCDANIEL: Do you think it's a legacy? That's part of our legacy from being a fenced community during the war? MR. WATSON: I think we can use that as a cop out. MR. MCDANIEL: Really? MR. WATSON: I think we can use that as a cop out, but then I think we can use that as a reason to make ourselves better. I would imagine, I hear the stories about Cobb County. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. Yeah. Sure. MR. WATSON: I can't just go to Cobb County and be immediately engaged with the folks there. I don't think I cannot with government tags on the plate. MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly. Exactly. MR. WATSON: I think if you are able to take a tie in, I spoke to a young man the other day who was an intern at Oak Ridge National Lab. We were taking a class together at University of Tennessee where I'm working on my doctorate degree. This young man found out what I did. He said, "Oh, you're the city manager. Where is Oak Ridge?" MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? MR. WATSON: He said, "Where's the city?" I said, "Well, you come out the gate and you take a left." It got me to thinking, if you work at the Oak Ridge National Lab, you don't ever have to come into the community. MR. MCDANIEL: That's true. MR. WATSON: You have to know, I'm going to turn on Scarboro Road to come up into the community but I will never have to go. All I see is the Solway Bridge coming in and going out. I never am engaged in the community. We expect as Oak Ridgers that they are part of our community and we don't understand why. They're not necessarily engaged. Let's say that's 50% or 70% that are commuting in and commuting out but not having to- MR. MCDANIEL: Never come into town. MR. WATSON: They never come into town. What does that mean that we have to do those other 30% that are out there at the Lab? Who are they? What are they saying to the people at the Laboratory? We can get those folks to live here. It can be exciting to live here. We're seeing a 100% occupancy in our apartment complexes. We need more apartments being built. There are the folks that want to ride their bikes and go over to Haw Ridge. We've got to integrate those folks into the daily fabric of the community. That's where I think shopping and a center of town makes a lot of difference. I think our promotion through festivals and concerts does a lot more. That's what people are looking for. We have to be ready for them and we have to make sure that they will continue the lifespan of our community because we don't want to make the decision of not having another college in Stamford, Texas. MR. MCDANIEL: What a great way to wrap this up. Mark, thank you so much for coming in and talking about your story and your history and your life and also, your thoughts about Oak Ridge. You've been here long enough to know what Oak Ridge and who Oak Ridge is. I think you have a unique perspective being the City Manager and also being someone who's involved daily on all the aspects of who Oak Ridge is. MR. WATSON: We've got a bright future. I think there are wonderful possibilities. We definitely have the brains and the minds that are going to take science into the future. We can make that fun and a lifestyle that continues that creativity. It all begins with each of us as individuals to spread that sense of community. MR. MCDANIEL: All right. Very good. Thank you so much. MR. WATSON: All right.
[End of Interview]
[Editor’s Note: Portions of this transcript have been edited at Mr. Watson’s request. The corresponding audio and video components have remained unchanged.]